Response to Kipling
The entire poem is an exercise in irony. It is a precise and direct response to content of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” published just a couple of months earlier. The title of that poem refers to the “burden” that white society must take upon itself of civilizing the savage countries of the world populated and ruled by those with darker skin and by darker skin is actually meant inferior intellect.
“Pile on the Black Man’s Burden”
The most precise use of irony in the response to Kipling’s poem is to adapt part of its structure. Each stanza of Kipling’s poem begins with the line “Take up the White Man’s burden” while each stanza of this poem begins with the line “Pile on the Black Man’s Burden.” In this way, the poem constantly reiterates and presses upon the reader that what whites view gloriously as a charitable act of goodwill historically turns out to have the ironic consequence of merely adding to the burden of being black in the white man’s world.
The Red Man’s Burden
It is not just those with black skin who find themselves burdened by white society and its expectations. The speaker addresses how America has handled the burden of bringing civilization to the native tribes that were doing just fine for millennia before settlers showed up. The word choice becomes deeply ironic with the surface suggesting the problem of the Red Man’s so-called savagery has been successfully addressed while the context of historical truth is that success has come as a result of genocide, displacement, and property theft.
Honorable War
Stanza Two moves from the burden of taking care of the Red Man having been adequately relieved to the next problem at hand: the Brown men of Cuba and the Philippines. The entire second half the second stanza is an allusion to the Spanish-American War that ends with an ironic commentary on the honor of that engagement. In reality, the war was fought entirely for the purpose of imperialist ambitions that was justified on the grounds of being a defensive reaction resulting from an attack by a foreign enemy against a U.S. Navy ship that was, in turn, right from the beginning so corrupted by unanswered questions that there was at the time absolutely no way of determining who was responsible for the explosion on the ship.
The Fundamental Irony
The poem concludes with ironic imagery that mocks the entire fundamental basis of American systemic racism. Here, the speaker warns that all this piling on to the burden of being a black man by a white world which justifies their actions as doing God’s work or being scripturally approved will one day have to face judgment for this assumption. The speaker concludes that things are not going to go quite the way they expect.
